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Oh Jesus no. Direct democracy is becoming worse every day, as more people are born. The more people there are, the worse direct democracy gets.

Even with the best education, the number of uninformed, misinformed, uninterested and just plain dumb people is going to outnumber the informed/interested by a wide margin. And their votes are equal.

How do you algorithmically form expert/meritocratic consensus.

I imagine a message board, somewhat like reddit, where the subreddits each have their own weighting (a constitution of sorts, could include succession and election rules), and each voter has rpg like characteristics. The anarcho-socialism board would weight votes from people with certain properties heavier than people who dont match their idealism. The software would build your user profile points based on how you vote, inferring from like voters. Then at the end there would need to be SOME form of truth, or what each sub believes to be truth, so the software knows when a person is correct about something and when they are wrong.

The beauty of this system being that a person can vote all over the place, and be considered an expert in one sub, and an idiot in another, but still be able to participate in both systems. Multiple parallel reality consensuss can be formed, and then compared to the popular consensus.

Well, they forgot to say that five star online platform - https://rousseau.movimento5stelle.it - is a php handmade webapp with a lot of security problems. Not a good point for the movement.

I think the wired article is decent, maybe it misses one important notion: the five stars movement has been critical at giving a lot of millennials some new interest in politics. For sure it's not the perfect party, but from a participation pov is the best thing we've had in Italy since decades.

I found it rather frightening how one man could create a "democratic movement" and control it to get it to vote the way he wanted - and how almost nobody involved saw the manipulation.
This isn't a bug of democracy, it's a feature. Democracy means whoever has the best propaganda and persuasion wins and people have absolutely no idea when they are being persuaded. Ask anyone, they'll tell you that advertising doesn't work on them and they make their own decisions. And yet advertising works well enough to be a multi-billion dollar business, especially during the political season.

If you don't like this, then you don't like democracy. If that's so, no problem, you're in good company. The ancients disliked democracy because in their experience it inevitably degenerated to tyranny. Republicanism and federalism are two ways to attempt to garner the benefits of popular rule while mitigating the drawbacks.

The content is pretty good, and the fact that Casaleggio is not alive anymore can be clearly seen on today's big strategic mistakes the 5 star movement is making, and after reading the article I think this is not even a bad fact.
The thing they got spot on is that the current crop of elites are not nearly as smart as they think they are. This is of course observably true, just look at the outcomes they achieve and fail to achieve.
Is "All he needed was" the end of the article or did I get paywall truncated?

I pay for paper wired, i should probably figure out how to sign in someday...